One Man

"God only needed one man."

GOD CREATED ONE MAN on the earth. The devil couldn’t kill him. Though he’d sinned, though sin had consequences, Adam lived 930 years. That’s a long time.

One man killed his brother. But though Cain murdered Abel, the devil couldn’t take his life through the hatred of any other man. God protected him, and he went on to have Enoch.

The earth became violent, every man went after each other. Except for one man, Noah. Noah preached righteousness, and when the flood came, all the mountains were covered, there’s no land anywhere, but the devil couldn’t drown him. Noah and his family were in a boat. Eight souls lived through the flood, eight people on the entire earth were left alive, but the devil couldn’t destroy them, and they went on to have many children.

God chose one man to start a nation. Abraham went from Ur toward a land he didn’t know, and the devil couldn’t stop him. He took his nephew Lot with him, and they parted when their flocks got too big. Lot went one way, Abraham the other. Abraham prospered. Despite the arid land he’d been given, the devil couldn’t steal from him.

Couldn’t kill Lot either. Lot survived fire and brimstone which destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. He was one man amongst people so sinful that now the city and its inhabitants are gone. Lot’s wife looked back. But Lot was alive and his two daughters.

God gave Abraham a son. Here’s one man 100-years-old with a newborn son, and the devil couldn’t stop it from happening. Couldn’t keep that boy from growing up, couldn’t stop his descendants from growing in number. Great-grandson Joseph has a dream one night. His brothers are going to bow down to him, he says. They get enraged. Stupid upstart. Who’s this kid think he is? So they go and sell him to Egypt. Now Joseph’s down there in slavery, he has no freedom, but suddenly his master’s prospering, hand over fist. Everything Joseph does turns to gold. He’s in a foreign culture, in slavery, and the devil couldn’t stop him from succeeding.

The master’s wife goes and has Joseph thrown in prison for something he didn’t do. Prison. Next thing you know the prison’s prospering, and Joseph’s running the whole thing. The devil couldn’t keep him from doing well, even in shackles. Joseph goes and interprets a man’s dream while in prison and gets called up before Pharaoh. Like, the big guy? Tells Pharaoh what his dream means and how to protect the people, and he ends up running the whole thing again. He’s so powerful in Egypt that he’s right under Pharaoh. And lo and behold, his family shows up looking for food one day. The devil couldn’t stop it from happening. He couldn’t keep Joseph down. Couldn’t keep his family from showing up there in Egypt. Couldn’t stop the family reunion.

And time passing, the devil couldn’t make those few people less than they were. He couldn’t kill them and, years later, there’s now millions of them. Millions. You gettin’ this? One man, Abraham, has become more than the sand at the seashore, more than the stars in the sky, and God knew them all by name. Millions of Israelites are in Egyptian slavery, and several Pharaohs later, one passes an edict. There’ll be no newborn male Israelites left living.

Except there’s baby Moses floating down the river, right under the nose of Pharaoh’s daughter. Oh, look. So precious. Let’s raise him. Yeah, you go girl. One baby should have been dead, but he’s not only alive, years later, he’s commissioned by God Himself to free the millions of Israelites that the devil couldn’t keep from multiplying. Moses is standing before a bush, and the bush is burning but not consumed, and he’s told he is going back to Egypt to set his people free.

One man, that the devil couldn’t figure out, raised in Pharaoh’s court, where he shouldn’t have been, and now he’s prophesying plagues. Let my people go or there’ll be locusts, lice, frogs. Hail. The waters turn to blood. That’s the Nile River. All 4,132 miles of it are blood. Let’s think this out because the devil didn’t see it happening, couldn’t change it back, and none of the Israelites, no one living in Goshen suffered nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. It’s light there, but dark in Egypt. Their crops are doing well, but those in Egypt are destroyed. Their cattle prosper, but not in Egypt, theirs are dead.

The devil couldn’t halt it, couldn’t stop what God was about to do, and all it took was one man that the devil couldn’t kill when he had the chance. Nor the one before it. Not Joseph. Nor his father, Jacob, Nor his father, Isaac. Nor his father, Abraham, nor going back generations to Noah, a man with a boat that God designed, that God sealed him inside. The whole world’s dead except for those God chose to save, and the devil couldn’t stop it.

He couldn’t stop Phara0h from letting the people go, couldn’t stop the Israelites from walking through the Red Sea. That’s through it on dry land. The devil didn’t part it. He didn’t dry it up. And after he sent Pharaoh through it, tryin’ to catch them, God goes and pops the chariot wheels off and closes the water over them. Water which was standing up like a wall ’til then. A wall. And I guess Pharaoh thought that was the gods of Egypt’s doin’, but we all know how it ended.

The devil couldn’t kill the Israelites in the wilderness. 40 years they walked around, and their shoes didn’t wear out. No one died of sickness, except when they sinned. But God provided a solution. When they looked at the snake on the pole, the plague stopped. What’s that, enemy? You couldn’t kill them with snakes. You couldn’t kill them with heat and drought. God brings water from the rock. And there’s their children ready, at the end of it, to cross the Jordan, and what does God do that the devil could not stop? He pushed the waters back 6 miles! SIX MILES.

Once more, the people cross on dry land, which the devil couldn’t stop, and they go up against Jericho where God saves one woman in the whole place because she protected the spies. The harlot Rahab. Yes, folks. The only person who the devil couldn’t kill in Jericho is Rahab, who tells the spies how afraid the people are of those Israelites. Their reputation had spread this far north.

The devil couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t keep them from conquering Canaan. He couldn’t stop them from surviving Babylon, where for 70 years they married and had children, then a foreign king, who knew beans about the Jews, goes and pays for them to return and rebuild the temple. The devil couldn’t prevent what is now the oldest living culture from existing.

Though he tried his best to mess things up, one night in Bethlehem a baby was born.

Thousands of years of promises led up to this moment. Through all those people who the devil couldn’t kill in a culture he couldn’t destroy, every word that was spoken was fulfilled. The Messiah conceived in a virgin. Not possible but there he was. Her husband, Joseph, having a dream which saves them from Herod, who tried, his heart filled with the devil, to destroy all the children for miles. Magi from the east had shown up, and they somehow knew what the religious leaders in the temple did not. Where is the King of the Jews? they ask. He is born, and we have seen his star. And the scribes are quoting Isaiah about Bethlehem, and everyone in Jerusalem is now afraid.

Afraid of what has been promised to them, of the Man who the devil couldn’t stop from coming to earth and couldn’t kill once He got here. Couldn’t tempt Him to give into his silly daydreams. Couldn’t shut him up when He spoke. Couldn’t prevent Him from healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. And though the devil stirred up the people, though he deceived the Pharisees and scribes, though he fooled them into sending that Man to the cross, the Savior of the World only died because He laid His life down.

The devil didn’t kill Him, and the devil couldn’t stop what would happen next. They feared it. They bribed soldiers to protect the tomb. After all, those crazy disciples just might move the body. Yet the power of God rolls back the stone and no soldiers could stop it. No man on earth could keep Jesus in the grave. No devil in hell could stop Him from taking the keys of death, hell, and the grave.

The devil himself didn’t see it coming. He thought he’d finally won. Thought it was over. But ONE MAN who lives forever is now King of Kings because God decided it, because God chose to do it, because God so loved the world and nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever stop Him.

And so we look to the future and the words spoken over it. Just how do you think that will end? Why, exactly as God has said it will. Because before it all got started and while it was all happening and though sin came and though men grew violent and though God had only one man, God chose that one man, and one after the other, their lives led to Jesus’ life and now our lives are made whole so that nothing the devil throws at us will ever stop us.

“‘The stone that you, who are in charge of building up God’s people, have rejected has become the foundation stone of life itself.’ ‘Eternal healing is found in no one else, for there is no other Remedy in the entire universe provided for humanity by which we must be healed.’” (Acts 4:11-12 Remedy)

“We carry this precious Remedy within these frail human bodies made of dirt to show that the supreme power to heal our characters is from God and does not originate in us. We are under constant pressure but are not crushed by it. While we often don’t understand the immediate reason for the stress, we don’t get discouraged, because we know the ultimate outcome.” (2 Corinthians 4:7-8)


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com